People have become highly reliant upon their mobile devices in performing daily tasks. Modern smart phones, for example, now often are capable of obtaining, storing, and executing a variety of helpful application programs (referred to herein simply as applications) that can greatly assist those phones' users in finding needed information. For example, a passbook application stored on a smart phone can maintain information related to airplane tickets so that the smart phone's user does not need to carry around paper copies of those tickets. Instead of presenting a paper ticket at an airport's gate, the smart phone's user can instead launch the passbook application—typically by touching the application's icon within the smart phone's operating system user interface—and then present a digital image of the ticket to the gatekeeper.
Operating system user interfaces can become cluttered with application icons when many different applications are stored on the mobile device. The space available to present application icons on a mobile device's typically smaller-sized display can be fairly limited. In order to keep the application icons at a size that is large enough to permit those icons to continue to be recognizable to mobile device users, a scheme that groups icons together or that spreads icons over multiple virtual screens can be utilized. For example, a main or home screen of the operating system user interface can be organized to contain a set of application group icons whose selection can cause the operating system to “open up” the corresponding application group, thereby presenting the application icons contained in that application group at regular size. For another example, a set of dots somewhere in the operating system user interface can indicate a quantity of virtual screens that the operating system user interface contains. One of the dots can be highlighted at a given time to indicate which of those virtual screens is currently being presented on the mobile device's display. By making gestures relative to the mobile device's touchscreen, the device's user can instruct the device's operating system to switch the virtual screen that is currently being presented.
Although such schemes can make a multitude of application icons available through the operating system user interface, and at a reasonable size, such schemes do not necessarily make it simple for the mobile device's user to find a specific application icon that he might currently seek. If a particular application icon, such as a passbook application icon, is buried deep within one of several application groups, or is located on one of a multitude of virtual screens through which a user would need to scroll in order to find it, then the time required for the user to locate that particular application icon can become significant. Unfortunately, under some circumstances in which the mobile device's user wants to retrieve the particular application's stored information quickly—such as when the user is boarding an airplane and wants to show his digital ticket to the gatekeeper—the delays produced as a consequence of the user hunting through the depths of the operating system user interface can be unacceptable to the user and to other people waiting behind him in line.